The Life of Pi - a movie review... kind of.

Last night I went to the movies to see the Life of Pi. I went with my sister-in-law and niece and cousin. Life of Pi was actually the third on my priority list of movies I wanted to see this summer, but my niece had seen Les Miserables and my sister-in-law had seen Quartet and none of us had seen Life of Pi, so it was the obvious choice. The movie is an adaptation from the book, Life of Pi written by Yann Martel.

picture source here

I nearly didn't go and see it. My instinct is to flinch from anything sad or brutal, and this movie is both. But it is also beautiful. Truly beautiful! There is such a deep, human-ness about the story, that it is a movie that will stay with me for a long while, I think. There are so many reviews and plot outlines out there in internet-land of what the Life of Pi is about, that I will not add mine to the myriad.

If you like literature that is not main-stream, and by that I mean has a message, has a depth to it, not fluffy or of common genre, and written from a unique viewpoint, then this is something you will enjoy. I read somewhere that this was described as the film that was unfilmable, because the main characters are a boy and a tiger... trapped in a small boat. But the filmmakers have worked their magic and it comes to life on the big screen (3D is awesome).
There's this one part where the tiger jumps out from under the boat cover, and a woman in the theatre actually screamed - which made us all laugh and lessened the tension.

When the book first came out, I was intrigued by it and thought it would be something I'd enjoy, but I must have read a few bad reviews of it and how hard it was to read, and that put me off. How wrong they were. How wrong was I!

I loved the gentle Indian-style music at the beginning of the movie, and the anecdotes of village life before the disaster of the shipwreck and what followed - which is the main theme.

Truly - you will be doing yourself a disfavour if you miss it.